Conventionally, mesh restoration, service provisioning, etc. in optical networks is on a fixed port basis with no dynamic adaptation. Here, timeslots associated with a port are fixed and cross connects are created dynamically during mesh restoration to bind to those timeslots. With the arrival of Optical Transport Network (OTN) ports, the same port may carry different traffic and also may support different payloads from a user's service point of view. This makes mesh restoration cumbersome as the user has to statically create the underneath service supporting embedded lines and then allow mesh restoration to use these static ports. Thus, the user has to break the OTN network into different service based subgroups to support service applications. There is no dynamic provisioning support to create an OTN overlay based on availability of the physical ports.